Write yourself notes. Leave yourself voicemails. Send yourself emails. It’s fine.
No one remembers everything. Really.
Symptom #6: Procrastination
Solution #6: Bottom Line: Deeds are Better
Joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging.
—Merlin Mann, productivity guru and humorist
You have a choice
Ah, procrastination: the villain in so many stories of the great adventures we might have had—if only. Here’s what’s certain: You do not always in the moment want to do what you know most serves your goals in the big picture. You drag your feet, check email and social messaging services “just once more,” follow that link to the funny YouTube video, flip through magazines or TV channels, anything but buckle down to the task in front of you.

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The principles aren’t too different: Set up groupings that make subsequent actions easier, move things to the appropriate group the moment you decide what it is, and repeatedly use quick laps to knock down big or constant projects.
This section includes many tips particularly relevant to email for work as well as ideas that will help you build a better relationship with your personal email.
Email basics
First, a few basic principles (and a thank-you to Merlin Mann and others who have taught me many things about managing email):
Start your day with energy, not email. Take a moment to clear your head, jot down any lower priority loose ends that are distracting you and throw them in your inbox (physical or digital) to address later. Then, get to work on one of your three top tasks for the day.

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Dive in, knock out a task appropriate to your current resources and energy level, then surface and check email quickly before diving in again on the next prioritized task. By “quickly,” I mean “processing.” For anything that generates a new task for your list, only ask the question, “Is this more important than what I was planning to do next?” If the answer is no, which it usually is, carry on as planned. Merlin Mann said it beautifully: “Don't let the blur of movement try to replace one elegantly completed task.”
Pay for checking email. If you find yourself checking mail far more often than actually results in a change in your plan of action, start forcing yourself to complete the next task on your list before you are allowed to check again.

And I don’t say that just out of concern for mobile visitors: regardless of whether our visitors were on a phone-or a desktop-based browser, we would have been penalizing them with extra markup.
Meet “mobile first”
When you have a free moment (and a stiff drink in hand), I recommend browsing through Merlin Mann’s “Noise to Noise Ratio” Flickr set (http://bkaprt.com/rwd/46/). These screen grabs showcase some of the most content-saturated pages on the web: the pages are drowning in a sea of cruft. And the actual article, both paragraphs of it, is nigh unfindable.
While the sites in Merlin’s gallery might be new to you, I wager the problems they demonstrate are pretty familiar.

If we want large systems where attention is unconstrained, fame will be an inevitable by-product, and as our systems get larger, its effects will become more pronounced, not less. A version of this is happening with e-mail—because it is easier to ask a question than to answer it, we get the curious effect of a group of people all able to overwhelm one another by asking, cumulatively, more questions than they can cumulatively answer. As Merlin Mann, a software usability expert, describes the pattern:Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn’t take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that’s taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if you wanted to do it over a few dozen trips.

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Two interesting pieces on social networking are: danah boyd’s “Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace” (transcript of her AAAS talk from 2006 at www.danah.org/papers/AAAS2006.html), describing the forces that led to the success of those services among teens; and an untitled weblog post by Danny O’Brien (www.oblomovka.com/entries/2003/10/13) describing the tensions among public, private, and secret modes of conversation in social media.
Page 94: Email is such a funny thing Merlin Mann offered that description of email at “The Strange Allure (and False Hope) of Email Bankruptcy” (www.43folderscom/2007/05/30/email-bankruptcy-2/. ).
Page 99: “Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.” Cory Doctorow offered that observation in a blog post on BoingBoing.net entitled “Disney Exec: Piracy Is Just a Business Model” (www.boingboing.net/2006/10/10/disney-exec-piracy-i.html).

Keeping things in their places will help you keep track of your keys and your corkscrew. Yet it will be much less help in dealing with your documents or your e-mail, because the system will buckle under not only the volume of incoming information but its fundamental contradictions and ambiguities.
Merlin Mann, a productivity expert, has skewered the desire to over-organize a list of tasks in a fast-moving world. Imagine you’re making sandwiches in a deli, says Mann. The first sandwich order comes in and you start spreading the mayonnaise on a slice of rye bread. But wait—the lunchtime rush is coming.

You're not going to just say words to sound smart. It also levels the playing field by reframing the question as a collaborative conversation. By learning how exact your estimate needs to be (and why), you can work together to develop a shared understanding about the true factors behind the numbers.
—Merlin Mann, creator and editor of 43folders.com
Solve The One Problem Staring You in the Face
My absolute favorite thing to happen on the web in recent memory is the release and adoption of the "nofollow" attribute. Nobody talked about it beforehand. There were no conferences or committees where a bunch of yahoos could debate its semantic or grammatical nature.

Use a Responsibility Grid to decide who does or does not need to get involved with whatever comes up.
Create windows of nonstimulation. To achieve long-term goals in the age of always-on technology and free-flowing communication, create windows of time dedicated to uninterrupted project focus. Merlin Mann, founder of the productivity Web site 43folders.com, has called for the need to “make time to make.” It is no surprise that Mann is also known for begging people not to e-mail him (in fact, he refuses to answer any suggestions or requests via e-mail). After years of writing about productivity and life hacks, Mann realized that the level of interruption increases in direct proportion to one’s level of availability.

Author Neal Stephenson explained in a 2005 New York Times op-ed: “To geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal—and to have a good time doing it.” True geeks have a capacity to geek out on almost anything—even kitchen cleanup. An enthusiast of productivity software named Merlin Mann, who in 2004 started a blog called 43 Folders that quickly became a cult favorite among programmers, once composed a love letter to a book he was reading called Home Comforts: “Some deranged fold of my lizard brain gets most turned on by nine detailed pages on how to wash your dishes . . . . I think my wonderfully tidy (and endlessly patient) girlfriend has probably resigned herself to the fact that I only get really interested in something when it involves some kind of fancy system with charts and documentation.”

We typically overestimate how much we’ll actually get done, and multi-tasking exaggerates our own internal biases even more. Whenever possible, avoid interruptions and avoid working on more than one project at the same time. If it’s unavoidable, be brutally honest with yourself — and your stakeholders — about how much you can actually get done under multi-tasking conditions. It’s probably less than you think.
Merlin Mann@hotdogsladies
“Good thing you’re tagging all those “Low Priority” tasks. God forbid you’d ever lose track of shit that’s not worth doing.”
12:43 PM – 1 Feb 12
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III.
Principles of Good Programming
The First Rule of Programming: It’s Always Your Fault
Jeff Atwood@codinghorror
“We should endeavor to fix ourselves before accusing the world of being broken.”
12:22 PM – 30 May 12
You know the feeling.

Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 49.
4. Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (Lakeville, CT: International Non-Aristotelian Library Pub.; distributed by the Institute of General Semantics, 1958), 376.
5. Ibid.
6. Productivity guru Merlin Mann is the originator of the term “inbox zero,” but the idea was first posed by Mark Hurst in his 2007 book Bit Literacy. I have used both their systems with success but have found myself differing with them on the question of email—most likely because email and the ways we receive it have changed over the past decade.
7.